Monthly Archives: "February 2014"

Here at Emu Ridge this made us all have a laugh! Not sure if so in your house but very true in all of ours!
If your looking for shampoo or conditioner we make a lovely natural one here at Emu Ridge click the picture for more information or to order – we post worldwide!

We love this idea here at Emu Ridge & what a great project! All you need is gloves, cement and your favourite plant!
Also reminds us of the dry hands some gardeners suffer from.

Emu Ridge have a fantastic Natural Barrier Balm, great for those who have too wash there hands a lot too e.g. health professionals, hospitality and retail staff, those in the food industry and I’m sure many more!

For more information or to order some barrier balm click on the picture.

Happy Valentines Day! Don’t forget we do fabulous gift baskets with lovely, healthy all natural products contact us with your ideas we can post them gift wrapped and with a card! or order some products and make your own.

In the picture above you can see a great idea for a little valentine’s gift don’t forget its the thought that counts! A simple butterfly cut out with Emu Ridge all natural lip balm which you purchase from our Emu Ridge website right here.

We are proud to present this Historical Footage. The link will take you to a short DVD. Its is a documentary that was aired on TV in the 1927 about the Eucalyptus oil industry on Kangaroo Island. Eucalyptus oil was Australia’s first true export overseas and Emu Ridge is now the only Eucalyptus Oil distillery in South Australia.

Emu Ridge Eucalyptus Oil Distillery, 1991 – 2011, 20 years of hard work! If you have the time this is a photo collage that I put together for our 20th Birthday Celebrations. Its amazing, things have certainly grown. Its nice for people to know how we began! Some great memories. Thanks to all our staff and helpers that have helped make us what we are today 🙂

This image was the Official Opening of our Original Shop the Old MacGillivray Post Office by Don Burke and we featured on Burkes Backyard, our first television experience 🙂 This link will take you to our slideshow. I hope you enjoy our journey 🙂

Love this story below, and its so true. Aussies are funny about eating our emblem. I have hand reared orphaned animals for over 20 years and we both love roos to bits, but if they need to be culled lets eat it not waste it!

My husband Larry has always been passionate about the exploitation of all of our natural resources and sustainable farming on Kangaroo Island and the need for more responsible land management. In the below picture Larry shows the Minister Kyam Maher a wallaby skin and tells him our fight for laws to change and how 100,000 wallabies are culled every year on Kangaroo Island and left to rot in the ground feeding the flies and feral cats, such a waste. Larry did a feasibility study in 1993 working with Michelle Leather and Macro Meats to prove it was viable to utilise our Tammar wallabies and later received a Winston Churchill fellowship in 1998 to study the production, marketing and utilization of native flora and fauna. Unfortunately nothing has changed, government departments agreeing it is wasteful and then nothing happens. One day things will change.

Kangaroos produce far less of the greenhouse gas methane than the cattle brought over by European settlers, and their jumping feet don’t damage the fragile Australian topsoil like the hard hooves of cows and sheep. Id rather eat an organic free range animal than sheep you buy in the supermarket. Our family have eaten Kangaroo meat our whole lives! Have a read of this great story I found below! ~Bev~

Eating Skippy: Why Australia has a problem with kangaroo meat

By Fuchsia Dunlop BBC News

Australians have an ingrained reluctance to eat their national emblem, but a number of chefs are now championing kangaroo meat as a delicious – and environmentally friendly alternative to beef and pork.

The glass cabinets of Dean Cooper’s butcher’s shop in the Central Market in Adelaide are stacked with leg roasts, steaks, meatballs, kebabs and sausages, as you might expect. But unlike any other butcher in Australia, or indeed the world, Dean Cooper only sells meat from the kangaroo. It’s a healthy meat, he tells me: low in saturated fats, full of iron, free-range and organic. And if you don’t overcook it, he says, it’s magnificently tender. One of his regular customers, Carol Wyld, says she’s been shopping here almost since the shop opened, 30 years ago. “Kangaroo meat is much better than lamb or beef,” she tells me, “It’s beautiful, it just melts in your mouth. And kangaroo tail soup is just divine. I’ll be making lasagne tomorrow night with minced kangaroo instead of beef.”

Fuchsia Dunlop

Fuchsia Dunlop’s interest in Chinese cookery grew out of a job at the BBC, which prompted her to take evening classes in Mandarin, and to win a scholarship to study in Sichuan.

She has written four books on the subject, but continues to work for the BBC World Service.

Like many foreign cooks and food writers visiting Australia, I was dying to try some of the country’s unique local ingredients, and none of them more than kangaroo. On a previous visit to the country I’d been impressed by local chefs’ commitment to sourcing the finest produce, and by the way their menus described the provenance of fresh seafood, heritage tomatoes and free-range pork. This time, I wanted to see how they cooked one of their most distinctive native Australian ingredients. And I knew that kangaroo meat had much to recommend it from an environmental point of view.

Kangaroos produce far less of the greenhouse gas methane than the cattle brought over by European settlers, and their jumping feet don’t damage the fragile Australian topsoil like the hard hooves of cows and sheep. Although kangaroos are a protected species, there are so many of them that they are widely regarded as pests, and they are hunted by professional shooters according to a strict quota system. In an era when chefs all over the world are clamouring to use wild, seasonal and local produce, one might expect kangaroo meat to take pride of place on Australian menus.

Surprisingly, however, most Australians refuse to eat it. On my first days in Adelaide, in South Australia, I scoured restaurant menus in vain for kangaroo dishes. The Greek, Korean, Chinese and Afghan restaurants I visited were testament to the multiculturalism of the Australian diet, but their menus maintained a studious silence on the subject of kangaroo. The only place I found it served was the Red Ochre Grill, a riverside restaurant that specialises in indigenous ingredients. There, some friends and I tasted rosy, sweet-cured kangaroo fillet, and a thick tranche of kangaroo steak served medium rare from the grill. But as head chef Nick Filsell admits, many of the restaurant’s customers are tourists and other out-of-town visitors. “Kangaroo is a bit of a novelty meat, like crocodile and emu,” he says. “Most local people wouldn’t have it at home.”

Taboos of the table

Australians’ hang-up about eating their most distinctive local meat is not particularly surprising, given the deep irrationality of human food choices.

Most people in the West, for example, will eat shrimps but not insects, pork but not dog, and beef but not horse meat.

History is littered with examples of societies that suffered because they wouldn’t change their eating habits, like the mediaeval Norse community on Greenland, who starved to death because they refused to eat fish and seal like the natives, but insisted on maintaining a tradition of cattle farming that was unsuited to their fragile northern habitat.

Most Australians I talk to in Adelaide and Sydney say they feel funny about eating kangaroo. “After all,” one young woman explains, “it’s our national emblem.” She confesses that the only kangaroo meat she’s ever had in the house was to feed to her kittens. Almost everyone I speak to mentions what they called “the Skippy factor” – a reference to the 1960s TV series, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, which encouraged Australians to see kangaroos as far too adorable to cook for dinner. Eating kangaroo, one chef tells me, feels a bit like eating Bambi, that cute young deer in the Disney cartoon.

In the past, kangaroo meat was more widely accepted. It was always eaten by aboriginal Australians, for whom the succulent tail, roasted in a pitful of embers, is a particular delicacy. The early European settlers ate kangaroo out of necessity, and many eventually came to enjoy a red meat that didn’t really taste so different from venison, hare or beef. According to historian Barbara Santich in her book Bold Palates: Australia’s Gastronomic Heritage, kangaroo recipes appeared regularly in cookbooks until the 1930s. Kangaroo soup was highly prized, as was “steamer”, a stew made from kangaroo enriched with salt pork. But as more Australians moved to the cities and living standards rose, kangaroo meat and other so-called “bush tucker” fell out of favour.

Celebrated chef Neil Perry tells me people considered kangaroo meat unsanitary because it was shot in the wild and didn’t come from the sanitised environs of an abattoir. His wife Sam adds that it is hard to escape the idea of roadkill. “People think of kangaroos being hit by cars,” she says, “and lying on dusty roads in the baking sun.” Animal rights activists have also stirred up anxiety about killing female kangaroos that might have joeys (baby kangaroos) in their pouches.

Kangaroo facts

Of 48 species of kangaroo in Australia, only five can be commercially harvested

2002 census counted 58.6 million kangaroos in Australia

It’s estimated there are twice as many kangaroos as cattle in the country

So more than 70% of the meat is exported, mainly to Russia. Some of what remains is used as pet food (kangaroo butcher Cooper says his friends still tease him, asking: “You still got that pet meat shop?”). But the tail, and occasionally steak, are eaten enthusiastically by Australia’s Chinese population, and Chinatown is one of the few places in Sydney where it can easily be bought.

A few pioneering chefs, though, are trying to revive interest among the Australian public in eating kangaroo, or at least its smaller, daintier cousin, the wallaby. One of them, Kylie Kwong, is passionately committed to using indigenous ingredients in her Chinese restaurant, Billy Kwong: warrigal greens, saltbush, sea parsley and quandongs or desert peaches all appear on her menu. “I jumped at the chance to use a native meat,” she says. “This wallaby comes from the pristine environment of Flinders Island, and the quality is so high you can even serve it raw, like carpaccio. I think our customers are pleasantly surprised by how good it tastes.” When she welcomes me into her kitchen, Kylie conjures up a plateful of red-braised wallaby tail with native fruits, and another of stir-fried wallaby tenderloin with black bean and chilli. The tail is meltingly delicious, like an Australian oxtail, and the tenderloin as tender as its name suggests, with a delicate gamey flavour that reminds me of pigeon breast.

On my last day in Sydney, Neil Perry allowed me into the kitchens of his Chinese restaurant, Spice Temple, for some of my own culinary experiments. As a cook trained in China, I take a Chinese approach. I cut some Flinders Island wallaby into slivers and stir-fry it with Chinese yellow chives; slice some more and give it the Hunanese treatment, flash-frying it with chilli, ginger, garlic and cumin; mince the rest and use it instead of beef in the Sichuanese classic, Pock-Marked Old Woman’s Tofu. I also make a kangaroo tail soup, slow-cooking the tail with wine, chicken and spices, and serving it with a chilli bean dip.

There is certainly nothing weird about the taste or texture of either wallaby or kangaroo. I’d heard that the lean meat, like chicken breast, would become leathery if overcooked but swift stir-frying keeps it tender and succulent. The spicy tofu dish is just as good as the beefy original, and anyone unknowingly eating the tail would take it for an oxtail.

With rising global population, increasing demand for meat and widespread environmental degradation, experts are warning that we will all have to challenge our gastronomic prejudices in the future. The United Nations is even promoting insects as a sustainable source of protein. Many of the world’s most famous chefs are also taking a stand for local, sustainable ingredients. Rene Redzepi, the founding chef of the Copenhagen restaurant Noma, previously garlanded as the best restaurant in the world, is globally renowned for his insistence on using only Nordic ingredients. On a visit to Sydney in 2010, he lambasted Australians for ignoring the produce in their own backyard. “I think it’s weird that I haven’t been served kangaroo here,” he told an audience at the Sydney Opera House.

In the face of pressing environmental issues, a fashion for gastronomic localism, and the efforts of local chefs like Kylie Kwong to shake up their perceptions, perhaps in the future, once again, Australians will come to enjoy kangaroo soup for their dinner.

We are very pleased to share that we have featured in a Swiss magazine “Active Live”. This link German article – Active live will take you to the full 3 page article in an easy to read PDF, hope you can read German, enjoy 🙂